On the recordOctober 8, 2013
Over my years in Congress, I've had the honor of chairing several conference committees. Conference committees are set up when there's a disagreement between a House-passed bill and a Senate-passed bill. You sit down with your list of differences and you start sawing away at them, if you will. That's, in fact, what the House has been doing the past 2 weeks in the midst of this shutdown. We've been finding some things, such as military pay, science, civilian furlough issues, and health-related issues--things that are less controversial and on which we can agree-- so we can get some momentum to come up with a big agreement. Indeed, the gap is large. We have disagreement on ObamaCare because it's one-sixth of the American economy. It's very big. Secondly, we have a disagreement on the debt ceiling. Do we continue along the path of spending that we are on or do we make corrections? Thirdly, we have a $90 billion gap between our spending level between the House and the Senate. These are bigs issues. Sometimes, a long journey starts with small steps. That's why I urge our friends in the Senate to pass the legislation which the House has sent over to them, and then we can start focusing on the larger issues. ____________________
